


Parallel Lines - A Rebelcaptain Fic

by kestreldawn



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Suffering, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 02:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10561544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kestreldawn/pseuds/kestreldawn
Summary: The prompt given for this work was "time."A series of memory flashbacks/montages, each relating in some way to a different number as it counts down from ten to one from the perspective of Jyn Erso.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the names mentioned are from the Rogue One novelization. I took what little tidbits were given about them and expanded upon them in my headcanon.

_ Ten. _

“Do it again.”

“But I’m  _ tired _ .”

“Do you think your enemy’s going to care whether you’re tired when they point a blaster to your head?”

“No,” she grumbles.

“Right, then. I said: do it again.”

Jyn’s tiny fists, hardened into stones, swing up from her sides, rise to her face. Her brow heavies itself under the weight of concentration, sweat, determination.

_ ‘Ten, nine, eight ..’ _ she begins to count, chewing her lip red and raw, feet beginning their dance -  _ left, right, left, right _ in the genesis of a circle, her minute steps charting a circumference in the mud. On seven, her opponent’s hand launches itself from his jaw and alters its trajectory in a wide arc to the right. Her eyes hone in like a sniper, calculate its orbit, adjust her tactics. A series of firings and synapses and electrical impulses drive her head down and away, the gust of wind and the threat of skin grazing by the flyaways she can never seem to control.

“Good. Again!”

_ ‘Six, five, four, three ..’ _ It comes on the heels of three, quick and sudden without any warning - knuckles driving upwards from his hip, set squarely for her jaw. She lunges back so hard, so fast that she nearly topples backwards, and only manages to set herself straight at the last possible moment. She reaches for and grabs his wrist, twisting and turning in a motion so fluid he’s shouting by the time she’s bent it back, the top of his hand pressed into his spine.

He grunts, tries to shift himself out of her grip, eventually yields. She doesn’t release her vice on his wrist, letting it linger for a second or two before relinquishing. A warning of her capability. A warning of her growing skill. He skulks and scurries away, shielding his face from her view. She thinks she hears him crying.

She feels a steady hand at her shoulder and lifts her eyes. Maia looks down at her with the closest thing to a smile Jyn has ever seen.

“Better.”

_ \---- _

_ Nine _ .

“What are the pressure points to disable an opponent?”

With each word, Jyn’s fingers, once too small to encircle a grown man’s finger, now longer and calloused and nimble, point to the corresponding area.

“Temple,” she taps her head, “Suprascapular nerves, here and here,” she taps to the back of her shoulders by her neck, “Radial nerve,” she taps the inside of her forearm below the elbow, “Median nerve,” she taps the inside of her wrist, “Sciatic nerves, here and here,” she taps at her back at the top of each cheek, “Femoral nerves, here and here,” she taps the inside of each thigh, “And the peroneal nerve,” she finishes as she taps just outside the center of the front of her thigh.

“And what does each nerve do when pressure is applied?”

“Temple: can instantly knock an attacker unconscious with enough force; best to use small, focused strikes like the blunt end of a blaster handle or the butt of a truncheon. Suprascapular nerves: a sharp strike to either of these nerves will cause the corresponding arm to cease functioning; most vulnerable when attacked from the rear at a downward angle. Radial Nerve: a strike here can render the arm useless, but the effect is temporary; it is best hit with a truncheon or a tightly closed fist. Median Nerve: will cause excruciating pain up the arm while also disabling. Sciatic Nerve: when struck with enough force, an attacker will lose function of legs; can cause respiratory failure. Femoral Nerve: will cause intense pain and disable the leg; best attacked with something solid and heavy. Peroneal Nerve - will cause severe pain and leg to collapse.”

“You’ve been studying, Erso,” Staven murmurs, the hint of something like pride tingling at the depth of his eyes. “Now, let’s put it all into practice, shall we?”

“Yes, sir,” Jyn replies coolly, her voice harsh and gruff, disparate and seemingly detached from the twelve-year-old’s body she inhabits.

9 BBY: Jyn Erso has mastered the artful takedown of an opponent using only pressure points, her hands, and the skillful wielding of a truncheon.

\----

_ Eight _ .   
She runs. Oh, how she runs. She can feel the fire in her lungs and the constriction of her throat with each dull thud of her foot against the dampened earth, vibrating and resonating up bone and sinew into her skull. Her teeth clack and clash against one another, and she takes the time to wonder whether she’ll have any left by the time she’s reached the secret Hiding Spot, the one that she and Papa had practiced finding so many times.

She’d always known, that it wasn’t just a game. That it hadn’t just been about beating her previous times or testing her agility or whatever excuse Papa might’ve used that particular day. But she’d never said anything. She never let him know that she had figured it out.

Somehow, she thinks, he knew anyway.

She sees the troopers boots, can hear the static and mumbled musings through their comms. She hears Mama’s voice floating somewhere in her consciousness, remembers the sadness in her Mama’s eyes when she’d slipped her crystal around Jyn’s neck. She swears she can feel it burning into against, into her skin, swears she feels the heat it creates bursting out through her clothes. She wonders if the troopers will feel it, too. She wonders if they will hear her strenuously controlled breaths, will hear the percussion of her heart against her chest.

She wonders if she’ll ever see Papa again.

\----

_ Seven _ .

“This is Captain Cassian Andor, Rebel Intelligence.” He slinks out of the sickly glow of the tactical map at his back, venom in his eyes and ice in his voice.

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?” His words flow like a melody Jyn would rather not hear, curling and sneaking into the curves and swirls of her ears. It ebbs like a tidal wave, and the harmony of it is betrayed by the acidity of his gaze. He looks like he’d rather take a pick to her skull, crack it open and take it upon himself to tinker with the grey mass within, as opposed to the required social protocol of interrogation.

“Fifteen years ago.” She carries his gaze, meets it with her own ferocity and strength. Challenges him to unfold his arms, let his fingers curl into the fists they itch to create, try to inch close enough to her to test her.

“Any idea where he’s been all that time?” She hears his predetermined judgment, hears the suspicion dripping off of his words, puddling at the soles of his boots. She remembers how Codo had asked her about her parents, once, right before Saw had dumped her and left her for dead with nothing more than a knife and a blaster. She remembers the shift in his gaze and the flicker of misgiving that lit it from behind. She remembers the way he never let her name leap from his tongue after she’d turned her face away from his lips all those years before in the grotto.

She wonders if he’d just been looking for an excuse to slit her throat in the night, and whether this Captain Andor would do the same if she isn’t careful.   
  
\----

_ Six. _

Jyn tries to imagine what Cassian Andor might have been like when he was only six years old.

She wonders whether he’d had his parents still with him then, whether they’d been instruments of the Rebellion themselves and naturally used Cassian as an extension of their dedication. She wonders what his parents might have looked like.

She imagines a woman not all that dissimilar from her own mother, some sort of raven-haired hybrid of Maia and Lyra. She pictures her with warm, dark eyes -  _ Cassian’s eyes _ \- that could devolve into silent weapons when needed. She pictures the same inferno within their sable depths, constantly burning with a promised retribution to all those who dare cross her.

For his father, she pictures a man with a sharp precipice of a jaw littered with the same dark crop as Cassian’s, imagines the gentle downward slope of his nose to be an echo of what she sees in front of her. She wonders if the silent torment that slithers beneath the tempestuous surface of Cassian’s gaze is from his father, too, or if that’s simply a byproduct of abandoning toys for blasters and friends for comrades.

She wonders what he might have been like, all those years ago. She wonders if he was more trusting, perhaps, or if the delicate canyon of his lips curled more often and with ease. She wonders if he had nightmares, if he dreamt of far-off battles, if he dreamt of droids and banthas and loth-cats. She wonders if he pressed his face to the viewport of a ship and marvelled at the vast breadth of the glittering blanket enshrouding them all.

She wonders if he had loved.

She wonders what happened to that six-year-old boy, and how long it had taken for Cassian to take his life.

\----

_ Five. _

Jyn wasn’t meant to be a beacon of hope, or a pillar of strength. She wasn’t meant to become the altar at which all of those who followed confessed their sins, sought absolution and forgiveness. She wasn’t meant to be the one to stir the hearts of men and women whose fingers trembled and hearts misfired at alarming speeds.

She was supposed to have lived a happy life, under the care of her Mama and Papa. Mac-Vee could have come too, she thinks, if they hadn’t had to leave him behind on Coruscant. Even Beeny and Blue Has Obitt could have come if she’d had the foresight to bring them along.

And yet, in the cargo hold of a purloined Imperial ship, she stares into the faces of those coveting redemption for the crimes they’d committed. She allows her tongue to flap and sway, allows her voice, her words to penetrate the depths of them, stir them to action, incite their passion.

She, a girl who’d spent her life without the ‘luxury of political opinions.’

She, a girl who spent her life running herself ragged in an attempt to eclipse and outmaneuver the demons of her past, who hissed their vitriol in every nightmare and sudden onslaught of memory.

She, a girl who spent her life without a cause, without a force to drive her forward outside of survival and necessity.

She, a girl who spent her life as other people with other names, forever detaching and forever estranging herself from the weight of the only thing she had left of both Mama and Papa, and the responsibility of carrying around the name Erso.

Amidst the faces of the men and women she could not, would not put a name to, she sees them: Chirrut, Baze, Cassian. She hears the whirring of mechanical limbs from the cockpit where K2 sits, hears the quiet murmurs from Bodhi’s voice overhead.

They are with her, and she is with them.

\----

_ Four. _

“It must be destroyed,” he murmurs, the light quickly fading from his eyes.

Jyn wants to extract whatever ardor, whatever incandescence she might have left within her to rip open her chest, pull out her own still-beating heart - and offer it to him. She wants to force herself into his mouth and down his throat to find the wounds that are stealing him away from her for the second time, repair them with her blood like a bacta tank. She wants to nestle inside of the cavern of his chest the way she had in their secret hiding spot, safe and protected.

She’d only been Jyn Erso then.

She’d been satisfied with and known nothing except being the daughter of Lyra and Galen. She ruined crops with make-believe and had nightmares of falling down the Octave Stairway, never finding her way back home, never again feeling the warmth and security of her parents’ soft voices and steadfast embrace.

“I know. I know. We will,” she coaxes, damning her words’ inability to mend his wounds.

Shelter him.

_ Save  _ him.

“Jyn.” Somewhere in the back of her mind, she begins to memorize the topography of his face, the altitude of cheekbones and the valleys like moats around his eyes. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows she will never again look upon the face of her father, her Papa. “Look at you. I have so much to tell you.”

\----

_ Three. _

The turbolift from the Communications tower descends in its murmuring hum, a fog of sound and light. Jyn’s tongue presses to the roof of her mouth, somehow lifted and anchored with the eternity she sees in his eyes.

A breath. In it, lifetimes and galaxies and universes neither would ever know. The width of a hair, the expanse of an uncharted star system, the blink of an eye, the leap of a pulse. Coagulated and congealed together into something she can’t quite understand, something she knows, now, that she will never have the opportunity to understand. Not entirely, not beyond the feeling of his breath against her cheek.

A breath. It’s hard to ignore the warmth in her gut and the trail ablaze that severs her in two at his gaze, so soft she feels she might shatter at his knees. He feels like the sun - illuminated, brilliant, bright, aflame with tendrils of heat that reach out to every part of her and beckon her closer, closer, and closer still.  _ ‘Three days,’ _ she thinks. _ ‘Three days since he first used the fire behind his eyes to attempt to destroy everything you were, everything you’d been.’ _ He had wanted to extinguish her and take what she could offer for himself. She’d been nothing more than a prisoner, recently rescued and far too unstable, far too damaged. Far too similar.

A breath. She wonders what life could be like with Cassian Andor, as the turbolift shudders to a halt. She wonders what the seedling hairs at his chin would feel like against the porcelain of hers.

\----

_ Two. _

“Trust goes both ways,” she says. She isn’t sure if she means to uphold her end of the bargain but hopes her words are convincing enough to satiate him.

They are.

_ \---- _

_ One. _

She imagines the promise of a future. Fragments of what could have been, what should have been float past her as she surrenders to the gentle syncing of heartbeats and breath, feels the pull of his fingers at the back of her shirt.

Belly-aching laughter, clutching at each other with relief and dissipating horror after another return, the heat of their bodies together like flint sparking into something deadly and beautiful, the entwining of limbs and of sounds as they form the most perfect union. The promise of love, and of wholeness, and of tomorrow. The echoing of a child's laughter, a baby's wail for its mother. Aged, weathered hands coming together at the end of their days, knowing that their lives had been magnificent, and that there was always another tomorrow somewhere on the horizon. Here, or there, or somewhere beyond.   
  
But no matter how hard she tries, no matter how desperately she splashes and flounders to grasp these barren promises, she can touch none of them. They sink and evaporate and burst into flame. She understands, then, that they are not for hers to take. They might have been, in another universe had things been different, but they aren't hers now. She has no right to mourn their deaths, no right to take them and hoard them at her core, like a child with its toys.

She has to let them go.   
  
Her tongue itches with every plea, every vow that had solidified in her gut. To remember him, to cherish him, to love him. But it dare not move.   
  
There is only silence, only their unspoken words to enshroud them.   
  
It isn’t enough. Of course it isn’t. It would never be enough to chase away the apparitions of what could have been.   
  
She should have known how the story would end, sunken into the sands of Scarif, entranced by the fortitude of his embrace, the ebb and flow of his breathing like the tide. It’s the way the stories in her life always panned out. It’s the way all of the great stories ended.   
  
Parallel lines destined to explore alongside each other, with each other towards one horizon, but  never to intersect.


End file.
